To the sea

The final segment of my Bulgarian adventure brought us to Nessebar, a cutesy and well-preserved mini city on the Black Sea coast. It's well preserved by the strictures of UNESCO, though increasingly encroached upon by the towering holiday apartments of the neighbouring resorts.

It's a small place, and opportunities to drink interesting beer are very thin on the ground. There's only really one outlet: the beer shop which I think is called Shark, but it doesn't have that written anywhere, only a carving of a shark above the door. A sign above it says "You Need A Beer" and it seems to be occasionally known as that too. It's very much a shop, bordering on a stall, open onto the street with fridges on one side and shelves on the other. But they have a portable draught system for three beers, and barrels and window ledges you can stand and drink at. In the absence of anything better, it serves.

On the one occasion of drinking there, I picked the stout called Kom Emida, a 6%-er from a contract brewer in nearby Burgas, called Beer Bastards, a name which deserves to be consigned to the same early-2000s bin as "Punk IPA" and "Evil Twin". It poured worryingly headless and a dark brown colour. Despite lacking foam, there was a certain gentle sparkle going on, and the flavour was quite proper. Dark chocolate gets together with thick espresso, leading to dark dry toast in the finish. It's a little thin, especially given the strength, and some creaminess would have set it up beautifully. As-is, and visuals aside, it's a workmanlike stout, and all the better for showing up in a part of the world where I would not expect such a thing to be pouring.

I had another of theirs, back at the hotel, courtesy of the Shark. The beer is called Opasen Char, which apparently means "Dangerous Charm" -- the name of a famous Bulgarian film of the 1980s. It's an IPA of 6.6% ABV and was knocked down to a bargain price even by local standards as the best-before date had just passed. That doesn't seem to have done it much harm. It's still a rock-solid IPA, broadly in the west-coast genre, amber in colour and fairly clear with it. The flavour is a bright mix of succulent jaffa oranges and spritzy lemon zest: simple yet delicious, and the sort of profile that made hoppy American ales famous in the first place. Quite a low carbonation and a weighty texture give it an attractive smoothness and make it very easy drinking. This, and a generally low-key bitterness, lend it some shades of New England, though it's neither as sweet nor as fluffy as they typically tend to be. Despite the high-concept art and too-cool thin 33cl can, it's simple and approachable, and very enjoyable for that. I don't know if it's being phased out, or is simply out of season, because this sort of beer should be a cornerstone of every independent beer scene.

The latter might be the case because I also found Opasen Char Summer Edition, which has a different coloured can to the regular, though I couldn't figure out what other differences there are. It's still an IPA, still 6.6% ABV and still a mostly clear and a medium amber colour. I didn't drink them side-by-side, but I thought that maybe this one, despite being fresher, had more malt going on. Zesty marmalade, dank resins and a whack of toffee or caramel were the principal players. Early double IPAs did all this, although this is quite a bit more modest in strength. It's certainly not a double IPA to taste, low-balling the alcoholic heat and adding a clean crispness to the malt side which underplays the toffee. The hops are still singing, in a deep and slightly sticky baritone: jaffa rind meeting piquant peppers over a warm mixed-herb gravy. It is at once fruity and savoury; enjoyable and exceedingly retro. Even avowed west-coast practitioners tend not to make IPA like this any more. The kids might complain, but this old-timer got a rare taste of when beer was exciting and a bit scary, something the Americans since taught everyone else how to do. Putting a bit of piney funk into your IPA may indeed be dangerous these days, but it's also very charming. Fair play.

The same brewer, with a similar look, makes Basi Kefa, a white IPA. It looks a bit orange for that, and the writing on the big-art, poor-information can doesn't show enough to tell me what it actually is made from. Nothing suggests anything different from ordinary IPA, though: an aroma of peach and mandarin is followed by a flavour along very similar lines, offering posh and highly-sugared cloudy lemonade and a slightly harder bitter grapefruit skin on the end. The only "white" bit I got was that there's a touch of herbs -- coriander and basil -- right on the end, but I would be fully prepared to believe I imagined them. This is a perfectly cromulent 6.7% ABV IPA, in the American style, with nothing fancy going on. If they've added wheat and herbs to make it into something else then they haven't really taken, and that's not a problem for this drinker. It does the job and doesn't try any silly tricks of the sort that make white IPAs too often taste soapy and savoury. This is IPA first, and "white" maybe, if you squint and turn your head sideways.

From Sofia brewer Alchemik comes Cherry Amaretti, one of those supposedly sour but actually sweet beers, though one which incorporates some of my favourite flavours. It's a deep shade of scarlet in the glass, and smells of an ingredient which isn't advertised in the name but is mentioned on the can, tonka beans: that sweet and spicy mix of chocolate and cinnamon. There's less of that in the flavour, where the billed cherry and Amaretto almond really do pop, suggesting cakey dessert, fruity cocktails and a little extra serious sourness as well. While sweet and quite thick, it's only 7.5% ABV, and the brewery deserves credit for keeping it so modest -- it stands to the beer. I don't think one could mistake this for one of the lesser "sour" fruit beers. It's been thought out, trialled and errored, and optimised for the drinker. I do like finding a novelty beer that's been done properly.

Along similar lines, the brewery also produces a beer called Peach Bellini, one containing actual sparkling white wine among the ingredients. It doesn't look attractively cocktail-like, being a murky orangey brown without a proper head. It's no quaffer either, at 8.5% ABV and soupy thick, much like all those other fake-sour fruit beers. This is very much in that genre, and exactly as not-sour, with peach syrup as the main feature. At least we're spared any lactose vanilla. And... and few sips in, I think I found the wine too. There's a certain oak character telling us that at least part of it has spent some time maturing in a wooden container. That's nice. That makes it a little bit of a cut above the usual; just a shame the usual is so very poor. I did like the wine element. Alas, you probably need a much more liberal excise regime than we have to make that possible here.

Bulgarian craft beer still has bottles. Imagine! The aptly named Sans Changement is from Bulgarian contract brewer Dunav but actually produced just across the border in Greece. It's an India Pale Lager and has a bit of a homebrew look -- bottle-conditioned and fairly murky as a result. Happily, the flavour is completely clean, if not very lager-like. The hops are fresh and citric, at a bitterness level somewhere between lemon rind and grapefruit flesh, but there's quite a hefty malt component which makes me question (a little) the cool-fermentation credentials. Not that it's a bad beer by any means, but don't come to it for crispness; that's not on offer here. The finish is a little on the quicker side than a typical pale ale, but otherwise it's pretty much one of those. Dunav, and the people it pays to make its beer, do seem to know what they're doing, however.

Ready comprehension of beers wasn't much of a problem for me, but I was stumped by this next one at first, thinking it another Dunav beer because it's in a half litre bottle and was next to it on the shelf. It's not, though. This is CH IPA by Trima i Dvama, whom we last met back in Plovdiv. It's a 7% ABV job, very much in an old-school American style, and a bit rough with it, shot through with yeasty dregs a-go-go. The aroma says toffee and marmalade while the flavour piles in unsubtle lime, grapefruit and pine in an  oily way that's all about shock bitterness with no regard to freshness or zest. This is American IPA made by people who have never tasted fresh American IPA -- a frequent problem in a global industry that depends on products being consumed close to source for best effect. It's not unpleasant, and I would guess this has changed the perspective of more than a few nascent Bulgarian beer fans on what's possible once you get away from yellow lager. It's all good from there on in, right?

My last, desperate, sweep of the shelves at Beer Shark in Nessebar yielded several cans I didn't get to drink until I came home. The Peach Bellini was one; another was Pelta's Can-Ye-West, a West Coast IPA, of course. This tied together the trip neatly, being a collaboration between Pelta/Hopium over in Plovdiv but also the High Five bar back in Sofia. It's a dark amber colour with a generous head, which is lovely, and massive gobbets of yeast bobbling through it, which is less so. The aroma is mostly sweet, but piney resinous too, channelling perfectly the dankbro IPAs of our youth. The hops go AWOL on tasting however. There's an initial rush of jammy summer fruit but right where the hard citric bitterness ought to kick in, there's a blank space. At the end there's a wisp of dry tannins and a little cedarwood spice, and that's your lot. I applaud that the floaty dregs didn't interfere in any of this, but dammit I wanted hops. This has mastered one side of the classic US IPA formula, but totally neglected the other, equally important, one.

The big finish brings us all the way back to Sofia Electric, and one they made with Põhjala, called Väga Suur. This barley wine is born of of a 12-hour boil and blended from batches which were six-month-aged in brandy, rakia and virgin Bulgarian oak barrels. Hoist the green, white and red! It's 12.5% ABV and a mahogany brown in the glass. There is a reason that breweries tend not to use fresh oak, and this smells of it. It's a sappy, syrupy sweetness that shouts over the top of anything else. I could still smell a little cherry-liqueur fun behind it, but would liked to have had more of that. The flavour is better balanced, and while the oak and fruit are still there, they meld together nicely. It's viscous and sweet, and there must have been a temptation to go big on the hops to try and balance that, but they didn't, and I think it's a better beer for it. On top of it all there's a sprinkling of dessicated coconut, making the whole thing taste and feel like some idiosyncratic eastern European dessert. It's quirky but absolutely excellent. In this run-through of my experiences in Bulgarian Craftonia the tone hasn't always been upbeat, so it's nice to finish on a high note.

From Nessebar it was the big schlep 400km back to Sofia, and then home. But I haven't told you about all the fizzy yellow lager they have in Bulgaria, and that's much more useful information than all this fly-by-night craft stuff. Come back to me on Monday and I'll tell you all about it.